With more and more CE devices connecting to the Internet, the opportunities for downstream revenue from advertising embedded within the digital content and on-screen applications are increasing dramatically. Note that “advertisement” includes sales advertisements for new products and services as well as notifications that items such as purchasable software updates are available.
As understood herein, however, current advertising systems limit the opportunities to increase downstream revenue for the manufacturers of CE devices. This is because advertisers typically contract with Internet advertising agencies to develop advertisements that are provisioned through channels that do not include the manufacturers of the CE devices. While limited revenue may be realized by, e.g., populating advertising campaigns into electronic program guides (EPGs) embedded in some TV models, obstacles remain to expanding advertising revenue to CE device manufacturers beyond the current EPG paradigm. As understood herein a standard network application programming interface (API) for retrieving advertisements for CE devices does not exist, and the use of proprietary APIs will not generate the scale necessary to attract premium advertisers. Additionally, supporting multiple CE platforms complicates negotiation and development with other business entities.
As understood herein, a simple unified advertisement provisioning and delivery service for CE devices may be implemented using a managed server, referred to herein from time to time as a “Ad Management” server, which acts as a gateway between the ad providers and the CE devices, prioritizing and personalizing the advertisements and recommendations for the requesting CE device. Advertisement provisioning and retrieval may be accomplished via two ad service application specific interfaces (APIs), referred to below in an example implementation as GetAdList( ) and GetAd( ).